Kuniko Yagi and David Myers bring the flavor at Hinoki & the Bird.Fred Prouser/Reuters

Trying just a handful of the most genre-bending parts and high-low highlights of LA’s deliciously diverse dining scene can easily take days of driving and eating. But the Los Angeles Food & Wine Festival, always on the pulse of its ever-changing city, made things much easier at its Asian Night Market on Friday. The downtown event, outdoors with the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall as a stunning backdrop, brought in the stars.

There was chef David Myers, not Asian, of course, serving up chili crab toast — one of the dishes that’s made Myers and fellow chef Kuniko Yagi’s new Hinoki & the Bird restaurant one of LA’s biggest debut smashes of 2013. We had a memorable meal at the Century City spot in March, eating lobster rolls with green curry and Thai basil on a night when Robert Downey Jr. and Stacy Keibler were in the house, and it’s become a go-to place for both the CAA set and the food world’s deepest thinkers. Grant Achatz, in town for the festival, tweeted this praise about Hinoki & the Bird: “Striking ‘green’ atmosphere like eating in garden, energetic in great way. Delicious, thoughtful dishes, great service!”

Myers, of course, is no stranger to restaurant fame. He’s got outposts of his Comme Ça brasserie in West Hollywood and the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. He’s got restaurants in Tokyo.

But the Night Market also brought in LA’s less-traditional, on-the-rise chefs and restaurateurs, like Starry Kitchen’s Thi and Nguyen Tran, who served chili crab gumbo. The couple started their culinary careers with underground, not-exactly-legal apartment dinners and, after fits and starts, recently found a Chinatown restaurant space that will hopefully be a long-term solution.

The mobile-food kings at Seoul Sausage Company — Season 3 champions of Food Network’s “The Great Food Truck Race” — have opened a brick-and-mortar location in LA’s Sawtelle cluster of great Asian restaurants. Brothers Yong and Ted Kim and chef Chris Oh are answering vital questions like: 1) What would happen if you made poutine with Korean short ribs? and 2) What would a spam musubi version of an arancini-style fried rice ball taste like? Just trust them. Like Kogi’s Roy Choi before them, these Korean-American streetwear-clad cool kids know that they can show up at events like the Night Market with the confidence that kimchi is now a food for everyone. That’s a world we should all be happy to live in.

So is a world where Ricardo Zarate merges Peruvian and Japanese flavors at his new Marina del Rey restaurant Paiche. Where Bryant Ng elevates Southeast Asian street food at the Spice Table in Little Tokyo. Where you can look down from the pop-up Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas lounge at the Night Market and see a big crowd still lingering half an hour after all these chefs had stopped serving. A crowd that had consumed plenty of food and drink, who just didn’t want to leave yet, who were still dancing to the DJ and extending the buzz (Party Rock!), but who were already thinking about where they were going to eat tomorrow.